23 Facts About Whitehaven

Whitehaven is a town and port on the English north west coast and near to the Lake District National Park in Cumbria, England.

Whitehaven has been designated a "gem town" by the Council for British Archaeology due to the historic quality of the town environment.

Whitehaven was the site of a major chemical industry after World War II, but both that and the coal industry have disappeared, and today the major industry is the nearby Sellafield nuclear complex, which is the largest local employer of labour and has a significant administrative base in the town.

Whitehaven includes a number of former villages, estates and suburbs, such as Mirehouse, Woodhouse, Kells and Hensingham, and is served by the Cumbrian coast railway line and the A595 road.

The area name of Copeland, which includes Whitehaven, indicates that the land was purchased from the Kingdom of Strathclyde, possibly with loot from Ireland.

Related searches

Whitehaven was a township within the "Preston Quarter" of the parish of St Bees.

In 1642 the manor of St Bees was inherited by Sir John Lowther, 2nd Baronet, of Whitehaven, who developed the town of Whitehaven, its coal industry and the trade with Ireland.

Whitehaven oversaw the rise of Whitehaven from a small fishing village to a planned town three times the size of Carlisle.

At his death the 'port of Whitehaven' had 77 registered vessels, totalling about four thousand tons, and was exporting more than 35,000 tons of coal a year.

Whitehaven was involved with the transatlantic slave trade, and records show slave ships leaving Whitehaven for voyages to Africa between 1711 and 1767.

Whitehaven spent over £11,000 in expanding the Lowther holdings in the area, and considerably improved the drainage of his pits; thus allowing mining at greater depths.

Today there is no mining carried out in Whitehaven though there is a proposal to sink a new mine out under the sea for coking coal.

Existence of a harbour or landing place at Whitehaven can be traced back to 1517, when quay-dues, otherwise known as wharfage, were recorded.

Whitehaven was, with Falmouth, the first post-medieval new planned town in England.

Whitehaven's planned layout was with streets in a right-angled grid which it is thought was imitated by the new towns of the American Colonies, with which there were strong trade links.

Whitehaven Castle was built in 1769 for Sir John Lowther as his private residence at the end of Lowther Street, replacing an earlier building destroyed by fire.

Whitehaven is on the Cumbrian Coast Line which runs from Carlisle to Barrow-in-Furness.

In 1941, Fred Marzillier and Frank Schon relocated Marchon Products Ltd from London to Whitehaven, which was a special development area, after their offices were destroyed by German bombing.

At Whitehaven they started manufacturing firelighters, then in 1943 they moved production to the site of the Ladysmith pit coke ovens at Kells, where they formed a sister company, "Solway Chemicals", to produce liquid fertilisers and foaming agents.

Whitehaven is a rugby league stronghold, its team Whitehaven R L FC play in the second tier of the British rugby league system.

Whitehaven has played host to a Maritime Festival, which started in 1999 and was held every two years, and then annually attracting an estimated 350,000 people to the small town.

On 2 June 2010, Whitehaven became a focus in the international media in relation to gun laws in the United Kingdom, following a killing spree targeting people living in the western area of the county.

On 20 July 2006, Broadcasting Minister Shaun Woodward and Industry Minister Margaret Hodge announced that Whitehaven would be the pilot site for the switchover to digital terrestrial television in the United Kingdom.